"Good walking?"
"Just like this all the way."
"Higgins, you stay here and rest."
And Higgins growled in response: "Come on!"
In the middle of the afternoon of the next day the operator at Citrus Grove spent five minutes in waking Payne. He had been paid five dollars to perform the feat when a reply should arrive to the long telegraph Roger had sent to his lawyer, when at dawn he and Higgins had stumbled into the station. The reply was quite satisfactory:
"Deal closed with Southern Cypress Company. Thirty dollars an acre.
Company reliable, progressive. Glad to have live development man take
hold. Their title clear. Will see to transfer at once. Wait at
Citrus Grove for surveyor who leaves at once. Garman unknown to them.
Will look him up."
Payne turned over on his side and went to sleep, the yellow bit of paper clenched tightly in his fist.
XVII
A week later Payne stood alone on the little Flower Prairie searching the flooded lands to the eastward and wondering why Higgins did not come. The week had been a successful one. A surveyor and a representative of the Cypress Company had arrived promptly, had smiled skeptically at first when told of the trip through the Devil's Playground, and when convinced had looked upon Payne and Higgins with the admiration of experts for masters. Higgins had remained at Citrus Grove to organize ox-team transport for the material and labor which had been ordered, and Payne had started southward at once. A sure, plodding ox team had carried him in a wide circuit through the flooded lands east of Devil's Playground to Deer Hammock. Signs on the hammock told that it had been visited several times during their absence. Payne found tracks of a size which he judged must be Garman's.
The thousand acres which Payne had purchased from the Cypress Company was found to run northward far enough to include the fairyland of Flower Prairie. The eastern line was where the elderberry jungle and Everglade water met and on the west the line was well out on the sand prairie.